Forced out of a job in the NHS for speaking out on Palantir

In 2025, I was forced out of my role as coordinator of the NHS Confederation’s BME Leadership Network. My crime? Refusing to use Palantir’s software, and refusing to keep quiet about the risks the US spy-tech firm poses to our health service.

I wasn’t the only one raising alarms about handing our national health records to a surveillance firm. But when we spoke out we were dismissed, marginalised, and silenced.

After more than twenty years working across the NHS, I’ve learned a chilling reality about public institutions – they rarely fail because of bad people. They fail because ordinary, well-meaning people follow bad instructions that systematically redefine what is acceptable.

When the sociologist Diane Vaughan was investigating the Challenger disaster, she called this kind of institutional decay the “normalisation of deviance”. NASA engineers flagged fatal flaws in the space shuttle’s O-ring seals long before the fatal explosion. But because early flights survived, leadership treated the risk as a manageable problem rather than a critical warning. No-one set out to cause a tragedy, the system adapted to incremental danger until catastrophe became inevitable.

We don’t need to look to space travel to see this mechanism at play. We’ve seen it ruin lives time and time again. Deportations in the Windrush scandal, neglect in Mid Staffordshire, drownings in Morecambe Bay. People just kept doing what they were told until, step by step, harm became normalised.

This exact same mechanism has been driving the rollout of Palantir’s £330m NHS data platform. But this time, the story doesn’t have to end in disaster.

In the next few months, the government will decide whether to cancel Palantir’s NHS contract. And right now we’re daring to hope they might.

Palantir is under pressure from all sides. Parliamentary committees are urging ministers to drop the contract. Investigations have debunked claims that Palantir’s software is cutting waiting times. Hospital trusts are resisting government pressure to sign up and doctors are in open revolt.

The illusion of Palantir’s invincibility may be fading, but it won’t vanish on its own. As the Challenger disaster shows, once a system normalises deviance, speaking out starts to feel unreasonable. Dissenters are branded as difficult, while rewards are handed out to those who quietly conform. When internal channels smother debate, public resistance is the only way we can break the spell.

We can’t allow silence to normalise the takeover of our NHS. Speaking out is no longer just an option, it is the only way to build a health service fit for the 21st century.

• Do you work in the NHS and have a tipoff about Palantir? Get in touch with us securely.